


Queer Coding in Homestuck - Case Study of Aradia Megido and Roxy Lalonde's Coding as Transfeminine

by bakedpotatocat



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Trans Character, Character Analysis, I dont have a tumblr anymore and i'm not getting a medium account, Trans Female Character, so i'm posting this essay i wrote for my 60 y.o professor here for posterity., theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 05:52:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18732898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bakedpotatocat/pseuds/bakedpotatocat
Summary: I wrote this for my College English course and my 60 year old professor gave me an A on it. I'm mostly posting it here so that when I talk about Aradia being trans coded I have a link to share with people. Lemme know if you enjoy it, but don't let me know if you disagree (I know I'm right). Also, I wrote and submitted this before the epilogues came out and while I'm not against transmasc Roxy I think it's a result of Hussie being too much of a coward to have made her trans all along, as well as him wanting the Epilogues distinctly seperate from Homestuck proper. Enby transfem Roxy still works fine with this theory / analysis however.Also, I know qu**r is still used as a slur in some parts of the world. I use it personally and regionally where I live it's used as a catchall for LGBT+ people to describe themselves, as well as in an academic context. Consider this your fair warning for it's open use below.





	Queer Coding in Homestuck - Case Study of Aradia Megido and Roxy Lalonde's Coding as Transfeminine

Homestuck is a mixed-media webcomic that spans some 15,000 panels and over 800,000 words. Spanning the length of nearly 9 years, with several hiatuses, it is a science fiction and fantasy work that formed the backbone of many people my age’s teenage years. It loosely follows the growth of a group of young teenagers as they seek to create a new universe and earn their happy ending. In keeping with its length, it is an incredibly dense and complex work, but many of the major themes throughout the work are queer in nature, and explicitly so near the end of the work. This is due in part to fan interaction with the work (Litwhiler 17), and also as a reflection of the changing acceptance of queer people from both the author, Andrew Hussie, and society as a whole. It is not necessary to perform a queer reading of many of the characters because they do become explicitly so later on, but one of the many characters throughout the work, Aradia, can and will be argued to be coded as transgender. In this work, I will argue not only this specific point, but also how it relates to the queer coding of earlier generations and the changing influences surrounding Hussie’s work.

            To begin, why is this a piece that is worth analyzing critically? Aside from my personal interest in the work as a formative piece of media in my teenage years, Homestuck is a story about change. It is not only the personal development of a seemingly ever-expanding cast of teenagers, but about the process and fight of developing a new and better world to live in. Adding to this is that the story arose as an interplay between author and audience (Litwhiler 17), not only taking direct suggestion but also that the fanbase’s attitude toward certain aspects of the story shaped the outcome of those aspects. This consistent and self-reinforcing loop of feedback and implementation not only makes the story greater than the author could have on his own but also makes its progression reflect the attitudes of the fanbase. Analyzing whether a certain character is trans coded matters because it reflects a microcosm of the progression of society from being homophobic to LGBT-inclusive. The change from gay-coded characters to trans-coded characters to explicitly gay and non-binary ones is a significant difference throughout the work, and the reasons behind that queer-coding parallel many of the ones when the tool first became used in the 50s and 60s.

            Queer coding is the method by which media implicitly includes queer characters in eras or audiences where that would not be well received. In television and film, it dates back to the early 50s and 60s, when both the American government and wider society became very wary of the effects media was having on people (Ennis). By incorporating somewhat stereotypical characteristics of queer people in media without directly portraying them as such, queer people could be represented in media without being censored or facing massive backlash. This had its problems, of course, because often the antagonists of movies and television would be queer coded; villainous men would be effeminate and flirt with the hero, and more masculine (often butch-coded) women would be dangerous and violent when compared to their counterparts (Kubowitz 203). This is also seen in written media as well, but because of the lack of physical and visual clues, can be much more hidden.

            One of the changes that we see in queer coding, especially in visual media, is that it has become less coded and more explicit. As LGBT identities become more accepted, the necessity of queer coding becomes less so, and identities that lie further outside the mainstream become acceptable to code (and eventually portray). As time has progressed from the 1950s, when queer coding was at its most necessary to represent marginalized groups without breaking the Hays Code (Ennis), to the current day, we can extrapolate the change from characters being gay or lesbian-coded to being trans coded. Very rarely are there explicitly trans characters in media, but often they are coded by creators for the same purposes that gay coding accomplished in the past. This is true within the work of Homestuck as well; it progresses from a work where the assumed romantic pairings between the four original characters are heterosexual (Hussie 2970) to eventually featuring an explicit gay marriage in the credits. One of Homestuck’s strengths, as written by essayist Creatrix Tiara (assumingly a pen name), is that it “It was willing to critique its own homophobia and present LGBTQ characters in fully realized ways.” The progression throughout the story also eventually includes an explicitly non-binary (a person that does not identify with either male or female) character. “There aren’t any overt trans characters in Homestuck, asides from the late addition of Davepetasprite^2, a … fusion of … human male Dave Strider and troll female Nepeta Leijon that has a temporary but quickly resolved crisis over their gender and is now considered canonically non-binary.” (Tiara) We can see in this an explicit progression from the enforced heterosexuality of the earlier parts of the story to a very queer perspective. Where, then, is the implicit coding that accompanies this microcosm of a societal change? Aradia, in my view, fits the bill as being not only transgender-coded on the merits of her own character arc, but also when that coding is placed in the context of the larger work.

Aradia’s character arc parallels the trans experience in an uncanny way. This experience is specifically transgender coded because of its characteristic focus on her body (or lack thereof). Aradia is one of a number of aliens that grow up on a much more technologically advanced world, and one that also has ghosts and other spiritual entities. Many of the other differences between the world of Alternia and Earth are interesting, but not important for the purposes of this analysis. We meet these characters right after they turn 13 and have entered puberty. Aradia, as we learn in flashbacks, was a very happy and optimistic person before puberty and her untimely death. She manifests for a while as a spirit, a shell of her former self, and then is built a robot body by an acquaintance, which she utilizes for much of the comic. While she inhabits this form, she is withdrawn and violent, lashing out sporadically at friend and foe alike. Not only is the body not truly hers, the blue blood that runs through it causes her to become jaded and moody, as well as a programming chip that forced her into feeling romantic feelings for the robot’s creator. These feelings of being unwell in one’s body, your hand being forced by biology in manners you don’t like or agree with, and especially the fact that this takes place right after Aradia should have been hitting puberty all line up with the experience of being transgender. Even if you don’t understand why something feels wrong or fail to explain it, it still affects you and your relationships. While this could be argued to be merely an over-the-top portrayal of adolescence, which is one of the prevalent themes throughout Homestuck, the exceptional circumstances surrounding her death and eventual rebirth point toward it being something more.

            Aradia eventually becomes reborn at the climax of both her arc and the first half of the comic. This is a literal rebirth; not only is she placed in a body of her choosing, it brings with it a major emotional shift. Rather than being sullen and locking away her emotions, only expressing them and finding joy in destruction, Aradia is happy almost to a fault. The narration, omniscient and often describing the character’s inner monologue, states in the panels following her dramatic reappearance; “You are now the Maid of Time, recently resurrected from the crypt of Derse. Your name is Aradia Megido, and for the first time in your life, you feel truly alive.” (Hussie 3565). This shift is profound, specifically due to the language surrounding the last phrase. Presenting as your preferred gender and having your body match, due to hormonal treatments or other modifications, is often the first time that trans people live. The sense of brokenness and rage falls away, suicidal and self-destructive tendencies shift to the wayside, and for the first time, you feel yourself. It is worth looking at the circumstances surrounding her resurrection. The process of being reborn as a powerful god in Homestuck requires your death, and this is both literal and symbolic of the ego death needed to undergo drastic change. While being one of the recurring themes amongst all the teenagers that undergo this process, it often is difficult for trans people to accept themselves as such and undergo a drastic change; some describe it as the old version of yourself dying. (Jones)

            Aradia’s status as being trans-coded is confirmed not only in her personal arc but how that reflects across the story. Shortly afterward her resurrection and the completion of her arc, six of the twelve aliens are killed unceremoniously, and Aradia and one more of the aliens depart willingly into exploring the afterlife, their role to play completed and having earned their rest. Whether this culling of characters was a planned choice or arose out of necessity because there were too many to devote screentime to is a matter of debate, but regardless, it has impacts on how those characters affected the story. Aradia’s character development ends after she finally inhabits the form she likes. When viewed in this context, it is apparent that one of her character’s main impacts in the story is to represent the trans perspective in what is by that point a gay work. This is queer coding when put in the context of a marginalized section of the LGBT community; the trans characters are coded into a work where the audience is accepting (and in some circles, expecting) gays in the same manner that gay characters would be coded into hetero-normative works in the 1950s. The progression of the story follows this trend. Shortly after Aradia’s character is written out, her arc complete, a human character, Roxy, is introduced and more explicitly transfeminine-coded. Her name and gender is hidden for a while and then revealed as girl whose name contains “the final two chromosomic symbols” (Homestuck 4463). She is “…interested in stereotypically-masculine things like science and technology while still being feminine.” (Tiara) This change from characters that are deeply but not explicitly coded to characters that are very explicitly coded is the process we see in how queer coding progresses as society becomes more accepting. Aradia plays her part as the heavily queer-coded character and fulfills her role once she obtains her new body and finds happiness.

            Homestuck’s transition from a hetero-normative webcomic (Wisp) to an explicitly queer one is slow, taking place over seven years. Within that timespan, and due to its nature and style of heavy fan input, it serves as a microcosm of the internet communities it attracted and their process in becoming much more open towards queerness. Aradia serves as just one example of that process, but an important one, her transition first into despair due to her death (occurring when puberty would have) and then her rebirth into a new body being a single case of much of the queer-coding and then explicit queerness that Homestuck exhibits. Aradia maps much too uncannily to the transgender experience for it to be a coincidence or reading too heavily into some scattered evidence. Her place in the story, and her quest to find some peace and sense of being alive, is a minor but powerful one in the span of the epic-length, mixed-media, fan-driven _thing_ that is Homestuck. The process of becoming generally more queer is a reflection of the process that hundreds of thousands of teenagers engaged with while reading Homestuck, and Aradia’s transgender coding is essential to what Andrew Hussie ended up creating.

**Annotated Bibliography**

Ennis, Tricia. The Strange, Difficult History of Queer Coding. SyfyWire.

Hussie, Andrew. _Homestuck._ MS Paint Webcomics, serialized 14 April 2009 – 14 April 2016.                 _note: number cited corresponds to panel / webpage number_

Jones, Zinnia. “Born Dead: Learning How to Live after Depersonalization.” Gender Analysis, 1   May 2018.

Kubowitz, Hannah. The Default Reader and a Model of Queer Reading and Writing Strategies     Or: Obituary for the Implied Reader. Style, Vol. 46, No. 2, Penn State University Press, Summer 2012, pp. 201-228.

Litwhiler, Austin Gunner. "From Pulp to Webpage: Homestuck and Postmodern Digital   Narrative" (2013).  _English, Honors College of Albany Thesis, 2013. Scholars Archive,            University of Albany._

Tiara, Creatrix. Bisexual Trolls and Non-Binary Sprites: The Power of LGBTQ Visibility in “Homestuck”. _Autostraddle, May 24, 2016._

Wisp. Homestuck – A comic by Andrew Hussie. _Yes Homo (a queer reviews webcomics),_ February 14, 2016.


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